Airbnb wants to recommend trips to users before they even start to search for them

As a company that books more than a million guests into rooms, apartments, houses and other accommodations every month, Airbnb has a ton of data to work with about everything from the length of a person’s trip to the kind of house they prefer when they travel. Vice President of Engineering Mike Curtis told the Structure conference in San Francisco that the future is in using that data to help predict what kind of accommodation someone might like, before they have even expressed a preference.

“The really interesting things we’re working on are search and personalization and matching, so that we can make a recommendation that will be so spot on that you don’t even have to go through the process of searching through the listings,” Curtis said Wednesday. Figuring out whether a guest and a host would be a good fit is “actually a really interesting data problem,” he…